The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture [Paperback]

Giles Gunn's important new work is at once a provocative defense of the kind of moral reflection once associated in America with the writings of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson and an acknowledgement that this pragmatic legacy must be reevaluated in the light of challenges posed by structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Including detailed discussions of such thinkers as Kenneth Burke, Clifford Geertz, Mikhail Bakhtin, Richard Rorty, Trilling, and Wilson, Gunn challenges the assumptions of modern criticism with a revised interpretation of pragmatism and its critical legacy. Part critical analysis, part philosophical argument, part literary and cultural history, this work is a carefully delineated vision of what criticism actively engaged in its society can accomplish.

A tour de force of cultural criticism from then till now. --Quarterly Journal of Speech

His touch is suave and his grip is firm... --Christopher Ricks,The New York Times Book Review

[An] ambitious and successful project...Gunn's thoughtful explanations, wide erudition, and formidable intellect make his book well worth the effort required to read it....Absolutely essential for all academic libraries. Strongly recommended. --Choice

An original and authoritative contribution to contemporary critical theory. It is brilliantly responsive to current European Post-Modernist discussions of the future of culture itself....He articulates a distinctly American perspective on the relationship of experience to language, and in the process redefines the rules of the game of the newly-emerging field of cultural criticism. --Hayden White,University of California at Santa Cruz

If you feel either the craving or the obligation to go on a tour of the jungles, the deserts and the scapes of cultural theory, you could not bespeak a better guide than Giles Gunn. Courteous, clear and very well informed, he puts himself entirely at lS®